HELLO BLOG

Bless me, Oprah, for I have sinned.  I have been unfaithful to my blog with that cheap and easy tramp, Facebook.  Can't help it -- I am weak and selfish, and FB satisfies my urge to pontificate quickly and without prescription medication.



THE LEMON IS IN PLAY

Mine favourite actroid of late, Balancebeam Cabbagepatch, has taken it upon himself to portray a first-class sh#t, in the form of Wikileaker and professional misanthrope Julian Assange, Ecuador's "Man Who Came to Dinner", in some Dreamworks (no great surprise) flick due out in the fall.  Can't imagine what would drive anybody to identify his own face with that of the self-sodden creep who cares not a whit whose lives he may ruin, or even cause to be lost, by making government documents indiscriminately public.  Fortunately, he deals in wholesale bulk product, most of which is such a bore that even the world's homicidal bad-boys probably can't be bothered to sift through it all -- but you never know when our strange world may produce a terrorist with as many personality disorders as the Ass-hat himself, who decides to plough through the files and find a way to kill off one of my kids or his military brethren. 

Julian Ass-hat is a scourge and a curse upon civilization, and I wonder how many of those involved in bringing him unmerited cinematic attention would appreciate having their addresses, phone numbers, bank accounts, incomes, family members' homes, and private email exchanges published just because Julian knows that he can.  He's apparently quite pissed off about the film, so if I were Cumberbatch and Co., I'd be sniffing out a witness protection program.

The Cumberboy is now one of the highest-demand talents in his profession, and seems to be accepting as much work as a human bean can handle.  This is a two-fold problem:  (a) he is in serious risk of being over-exposed, and if the Assange pic is a genuine lemon (which is entirely possible, since Ass-hat is well past his best-before date for his 15 minutes of ill-gotten fame), there will be the sound of a massive dull thud just as his star is in ascendancy; and (b) if he doesn't take a break he'll never meet a nice girl and settle down and have lots of lovely children, which he's always saying he wants to do. 

[See what happens when there's Too Much Information floating around the inter-webs?]

Far better to apply one's long face and cupid's bow lips to a more fitting biography. 

Anyone thought about Mr. Clusterbomb for a life of Albrecht Dürer?

Can you see it?  Huh?  Huh?

HELL WEEK ISN'T JUST FOR FRAT HOUSES

Last Friday night I had missed my usual Special Report with Bret Baier, so turned on the Shep Smith Fox Report at 7:00.  First words out of smarmy Shep's mouth:  "Attack at Leatherneck -- two Marines killed and more wounded...."

Seven hours later (spent in an armchair reading the same news report over and over again from every corner of the globe), our Cincinnatus weighed in via email that he was among the living and intact.  He had been in country for all of three weeks, long enough to get sunburned and form an unfavourable opinion of people who murder American ambassadors.  Then it all went Kaboom.

I haven't anything more to say about that at the moment.  I'll just highlight a couple of grim assessments of the Leatherneck situation from intrepid self-embed Michael Yon (saints preserve him), here and here.


INSURRECTIONS WELCOME

...as long as they are instigated by a wise law professor from Ithaca, mastermind at Legal Insurrection.  New contributor Joel Engel weighs in with his assessment of an American turning point embodied in this photograph.

I guess I should 'splain that the original photo has been, uh, tampered with.  Go to Quickmeme Defend the Constitution and enjoy all 1600 variations.

REAL LIFE ~ THE ONION:
A SEAMLESS GARMENT

PRESIDENT-OF-THE-WORLD OBAMA
WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Mere days ago the kings of the satirical world over at The Onion [read regularly -- die laughing] gave us a short list of the highlights of Barry Obambi's address to the United Nations, among them:

-- Now is a time when we must do something about some problem, perhaps by working with others.

-- If Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons, then it will have to face blank and blank. Oh shoot, I forgot to fill those in.

Little did they know that, based on these very concepts, that very president would shortly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Or is that Piss Prize?, awarded, as it has been so often in recent years, for little more than consistently pissing on the United States whenever a microphone presents itself -- see: Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat....

Little did we know that the criteria for Nobel status would evolve into something resembling a grading category on a kindergarten report card ["does not run with scissors" or, dare I say it, "promises hope and change"] -- marked on a Dewey-esque sliding scale of "pass/fail" or "satisfactory/unsatisfactory", of course.

On a more serious note, the folks at PowerLine have put together a nice summary of the history of Nobel Prizes, ancient and modern, which explains how these absurdities just keep happening, and how, in fact, the once-prestigious award has a very long record of being fairly ridiculous. Read and learn.

Instapundit has an excellent round-up of responses, including a devastating poignard from Richard Cohen at the WaPo (who will temporarily be forgiven for making effective use of a slur on Sarah Palin), and some wise words from my friend David Warren (via RealClearPolitics). Even the Huffington Post is rattled by the ridiculousness of it. [No link -- life is too short....] Gateway Pundit offers up that it was Nobel for "the gift of gab" -- fair enough.

Is this just another case of "Trophy Kid" Syndrome? The unfortunately-named Starshine Roshell seems to have more sense than her parents [cripes, boomers, the things you did to your kids -- Starshine???], and wrote a needed complaint about what it means when you give a trophy to just anybody, merely for showing up. Little did she know that six months later.....

IRONY ALERT: Oh, those cut-ups at Saturday Night Live! Little did they know that the Big Prize would soon be awarded to the President they had slam-bammed the week before for having been in office nine months and achieved absolootly nuttin' -- nada -- not so much.


POST RACIAL AMERICA

Remember that campaign promise? Well, I'm betting it will come true -- later rather than sooner, and in a backwards fashion. I'm betting that ordinary pale Americans ["white" is ridiculous, and "Caucasian" is exclusionary and inaccurate] are going to get so fed up at being called racists for voicing opinions and ideas that have nothing whatever to do with racial considerations, they are going to start barking back or just ignoring the Amen-corners of the Racial Grievance Industry, and eventually silence them all by diminution and irrelevance. It has begun already.

What's terribly sad, though, is that the road to racial harmony has been carpet-bombed in the few months since the ascendacy of The First Black President and Harbinger of Racial Harmony, due entirely to the redoubled efforts of the racial grievance industry, who can think of no other defense of their stumbling standard-bearer as he fraks up his foray into global politics. Check out this sad survey on the question of whether America is or isn't a basically fair and decent society. That opinion among the country's major minority group has turned on a dime [perhaps one of the few remaining in the national purse, Mr. Geithner?] is itself utterly indecent.


SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

That snippet of Biblical text is often misinterpreted by those who were deprived of learning their King James English: "Suffer the little children come unto to me" means, in today's lingo, "Let the children approach me." The words carry no meaning related to the endurance of physical pain.

Sadly, the two interpretations (correct and not) are increasingly, perversely, fused as we observe in the culture the acclerating normalization of "intergenerational sex". The most recent, most heinous development is the downright weirdsmobile support for convicted child-rapist Roman Polanski, found overwhelmingly among the European (largely the Fwench) "arts community", but leaking frighteningly over into the upper echelons of Hollyweird.

The Polanski affair, however, remains at the fringes of society by virtue (ahem) of having sprouted from the weedy world of entertainment, where no one expects to find normality, whether it is in matters of serial marriage, drug habits, or obscene amounts of money being invested in really really bad taste, from horrible fashions to obese mansions full of kitsch furnishings.

Far more disturbing is the introduction of skewed morality into the politics and education that are supposed to serve the rest of us -- the normal people in nice little homes in ordinary neighbourhoods around the corner from the barber shop. In the United States this skewed crew has come to rest in the nest of Czars -- Presidential appointments to positions of advisory authority and policy influence, appointments requiring no public vetting or representative approval process.

Various czars have been outed as having troublesome records, the most extreme of examples of which have recently crashed -- Van Jones, "Green Jobs Czar", was revealed to be a self-described Communist (bad) and, by any definition, an anti-white racist (way badder). But a President, who is proving himself to be as GREEN as a man can be at his own new JOB, was a long-time admirer and couldn't wait to get Jones on his team.

More disturbing is the presence of Kevin Jennings in a Czar-ship where his capacity to do horrific damage is far greater than Jones's boondoggle. Jennings, by some bizzarro twist of circumstances, ended up being "Safe Schools Czar" -- this despite his being a gay activist whose work and publications all revolve around one aspect or another of being gay in school.

The crowning finial seems to be his intro blurb for a book called Queering Elementary Education [no, I'm not making that up]. Apparently in that Foreword, Jennings totally (and revealingly) steps in it, by expressing some brand of endorsement for a certain Harry Hay, who has an unsavoury connection with the notorious NAMBLA -- the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Learn all you need (and perhaps more than you care) to know about that group from a new book, The Last Undercover [profiled here at Big Hollywood], about the FBI's exposure of its repugnant operations, by intrepid agent Bob Hamer. It's one thing to sacrifice your life for your country -- another to sacrifice the inner sanctity of your own mind, which this poor man probably had to do in order to achieve his aims.

Big Hollywood, obviously a significant source of reflection on the Polanski affair, and thus on larger issues regarding mainstreaming of pedophilia, also offers an interesting piece by a gay conservative who was himself a "Lolito", as he calls it. It won't be agreeable to every reader, but is also food for thought, especially about what happens to the Tolerance Police when fascism becomes fashionable.

John Nolte at Big Hollywood weighs in with a rather chilling piece on Hollywood's pedophilia-mainstreaming agenda. I weigh in on page 4 of his comments, citing a terrific 1997 article by Norman Podhoretz -- Lolita, My Mother-in-Law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flynt -- about how Nabokov's Lolita made pedophilia "thinkable", for which reason Podhoretz, who once made a career of debating against censorship of any kind, came to the reluctant conclusion that Lolita should never be read, and never even have been written. Food for thought, from Commentary -- for purchase, but worth it.

October 9 -- 69th would-be birthday of the composer of Imagine. Imagine all the people living for today. How perfect. How ee-e-e-e-e-w-w-w.

Imagine the vast expensive estate in the British countryside. Imagine the custom-made white grand piano in the gigantic mansion sitting-room with the garden view. "Imagine all the people sharing all the world" (except maybe that giant estate and its sitting room: "Zer vuss rhoom for seven families in ziss house..." -- Dr. Zhivago)

"Imagine no possessions," like the custom-painted Rolls Royce.

Imagine -- the speedo version, but you get the gist...

UNITED NATIONS FOLLIES:

Gale alert: OBAMA WAGS HIS FINGER AND SAYS "THE MURDER OF INNOCENTS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED"

Is that a fact?

Apparently some innocents are more equal than others.


Meanwhile back at Turtle Bay ["Filmore East", says Dennis Miller]:

CANADA GROWS A PAIR AND VOWS TO WALK OUT ON HOLOCAUST-DENYING MADMOOD AHMADINNERJACKET

Do not mess with these people.


Over at Jewish World Review,

GEORGE WILL SOUNDS OFF ON THE "invertebrate" TELEPROMPTER KING

Bile alert: wear you Mackintosh and wellies, and bring your brolley. Will has clearly run out of patience with The One and the bulk-head of his bile boiler has burst its rivets --tsunami!!!



NOW THAT IRAN IS NEARLY NUCLEAR:

Surprise necessities for survival. Number 1 is, like, so-o-o obvious. [From Popular Mechanics, the magazine for essential debunking in a bunk-filled world -- Katrina, 9/11 "Truthers", etc.] Hat-tip/Instapundit.

WHAT I FOUND WHEN GOOGLED
"OBAMA+U.S.+REPUTATION"


You're gonna love this:

I Googled and got an Inauguration Day post that recounts a December 2008 interview with Worst President Ever Jimmy Carter. Money quote:

...not too long ago somebody asked me if the new President could change the reputation of our country in the first hundred days he was in the office and I said he could change the reputation of our country in the first ten minutes...

How's that reputation enhancement working out for you so far, America?

Well, according to our former friends and allies, the citizens of Poland, it's working out like this:







Translated in English, that would be:


TREASON!









[from their website.:]





















[hat-tip: the increasingly essential, Acorn-busting Gateway Pundit]

Hugh Hewitt makes a neat point:

"The kid's not ready." That's what a friend's father has been saying about Obama since the day he was elected. If Matt Latimer's tacky-by-definition tell-all book is to be believed, it's something Bush said as well. "Not Ready To Lead" is sounding more true all the time ("Always Ready To Campaign" could work nicely, though). As so often with President Obama, we are left to believe that he is either 1) haplessly naive, 2) brilliant beyond measure and playing a game of long ball none of us can comprehend, or 3) not interested in what have traditionally been American interests.

Or he's a triple-threat player.

Hewitt links to this gem at the Corner:

Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, ACORN's gotta engage in fraud, and Obama's gotta talk. It's really that simple; and it is amazing, given how little this guy actually knows about economics, about foreign affairs, about, well, just about anything...

Obama was reported, after the speech [at the 2004 Democratic Convention] and the thunderous reception that it received, to have said to someone, "You know, I can play in this league."

And so there we have it: Obama really believes at his core that empty rhetoric is the same as substance and judgement.

Read it all.

That curious quotation -- "I can play in this league" -- conjures up a later, similar little squeak of hubris, uttered to Harry Reid: "I have a gift" -- reflected on by Daniel Henninger, with considerable prescience, last April. By September, the increasing consensus is that "the gift has stopped giving, because people have started listening."

And just in case anyone wanted to know precisely when it all started to go horribly, horribly wrong for Mr. Obama, that December interview might provide a clue:

Kira: With the new president elect Barack Obama, what do you think about him being the new president elect and do you have any advice for him?

Jimmy Carter: Well, I have already talked to his major appointments - I have talked to the next Secretary of State and the next Security Advisor who will be in the White House with him and I have also yesterday talked with the person who is going to represent him and United States at the United Nations. So, I have already prepared him for some of the things that the Carter Center is doing that he might find helpful.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.


On a final note, during a conversation with popculture rabbi, Michael Medved, something happened to insure that "John McCain's approval rating among conservatives just skyrocketed." [hat-tip/ Gateway Pundit]

McCain broke down and admitted that "President Carter has earned his place as, if not the worst president in history, then certainly the worst in the 20th century."

SAY WHAT?

WHERE WAS THIS STRAIGHT-TALKIN' SENATOR MCCAIN IN 2008?

OBAMA PONTIFICATE, DAY 9:

HOW'S MY DRIVING?

Well, let's see -- we've got a tax-cheat running Treasury, one Chicago croney refused entry into Canada for his criminal record, another cog in the Chicago machine kicked out of the Governor's mansion for trying sell the former senator's seat, a couple of other croneys set to be called as witnesses in the guberatorial criminal prosecution, an FALN-terrorist-booster heading for Attorney General, a defense contractor lobbyist hired in a supposedly lobbyist-free zone, a woman who called Hillary Clinton a "monster" now working under her at State, a headlong rush into Islamofascist hobnobbing via Al-Arabiya TV and overtures to Madmood (The-only-good-Jew-is-a-dead-Jew) Ahmadinnerjacket, and a colossal Ugly Betty glob o' pork fat laughably referred to as a Stimulus Package that lumbered through the House without even being able to get all the Democrats behind it.


Having gotten 'the new era of bipartisanship' off to a good start by failing to see that Republicans had any input whatsoever on the economic recovery legislation, and then 'splaining it to them by spurting out 'I won!' in a meeting, the new Communicator-in-Chief thought it would be a good move to attack by name yet another private citizen employed in the media, exchanging his fixation on Fox's Sean Hannity for the chance to take public pot-shots at the far more intelligent, clever, and influential Rush Limbaugh -- thereby setting himself up for a much more difficult job of sleazing the Fairness Doctrine (by any other name) past the American people without a huge ugly fight.

And then there's the I'm-too-COOL-to-wear-a-suit-to-work portrait of the president at work in an Oval Office heated up like a sauna, when he's been preaching to the rest of us to turn the thermostat down, even as he has teased Washingtonians for being wimps in the face of a little ice -- trying simultaneously to be imaged as a rugged Chicagoan and a Hawaiian hot-house flower all within about 48 hours.

Not to mention the 9/11 widows & families who are offended by his intention (it doesn't deserve to be called a 'plan') to close Gitmo, the military families who are cheesed that he's the first president in the history of the Medal of Honor Inaugural Ball to blow it off in favor of ten other more important events, and all of us who wanted to smack him for the ungenerous and falacious characterizations of what's been going on the past eight years, as recounted in his mooshy mess of an inaugural address.

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

Honest to God, in my worst imaginings of the unpreparedness of Barack Obambi for the position of Chief Executive, I never dreamed he could prove himself such a rank amateur in less than two weeks. I wish I could even enjoy it a little, but anyone with a half-decent survival instinct wouldn't be so foolish as to do that.

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT...DA-DEE-DAH

If there's one thing Mr. Obama proved about himself during the Long March to the White House, it was that, despite his prep school and high-falutin' college eddication, he is, um, as 'history challenged' as just about any kid stumbling out of an American high school these days.

So is it any surprise that the guy who thought that the Kennedy/Khruschev summit debacle of 1961 was a model of international relations outreach, and who didn't seem to know who the enemy was at Yalta or Potsdam, now thinks it a good idea to return to that 'respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago' ?

Now let's get more specific, Mr. President -- was that 30 years ago when we were cozy with the Shah of Iran (until we stepped aside to let him get overthrown), or was that 20 years ago, when some of us remember this:

YEAH, 'BAMA'S GONNA PARTY
LIKE IT'S 1989!!!!
















The formidable Max Boot puts the boot to this clap-trap and gives the cliff-notes to those decades of history, vis-a-vis our partnership with those who were torturing Marine Col. William Higgins to death, issuing fatwas against the life of Salman Rushdie, hanging Ali Bhutto, and nurturing the seed of the Taliban. Ah, yes....


THOSE WERE THE DAYS, MY FRIEND
WE THOUGHT THEY'D NEVER END

(441, 442, 443.......).






[Who was the unmasked man?]
















AND WE ALL KNOW HOW WELL IT ALL TURNED OUT:


President Jimmah Carter -- wasn't he just
the pea-nuttiest?!!!


(442, 443, 444-------------and, POW!)


To think I actually felt kinda sorry for that schmuck, Carter, when the split-screen tv showed his final limo ride on Reagan's inauguration day on one side, and the hostages coming home on the other. The bad guys didn't score quite that big again until September 11.

Well, we can't look for a knight on a white horse to come riding out of the west to save us this time -- but at least there are signs of hope (in the genuine, non-bumper-sticker sense):

Recently retrieved from the Lost and Found Dept.: 177 pairs of Republican GONADS, returned to the U.S. House of Representatives.

And now a message from one of our sponsors.

JUST ONE VOICE
but it speaks volumes



Back soon with our regularly scheduled program [Convention, Day Four]

GERMANS LOVE OBAMA -- CAN'T VOTE

IRAQIS HATE BIDEN -- CAN'T VOTE

All for the best, I guess, but.......

I always had the feeling that Gibberin' Joe Biden's plan for a tripartite division of Iraq along sectarian lines had been hatched without the least interest in what the Iraqis wanted for themselves -- even if it might possibly work, it was still something an American had no business advocating within the American Congress.

Now we know that the Iraqis were keeping an eye on Joe too, and were in complete agreement with me. (I always had the feeling a lot of them were pretty smart....)

Reuters (of all people!) reports the story. Money Quote Music to mine ears:

Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq's feuding Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.

"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters. "We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."

Tigerhawk weighs in with his take:

Anyway, it is a reflection of the diminishing political significance of the Iraq war that Barack Obama, who secured the Democratic nomination in part by making much of his opposition to the war and his plan to withdraw our troops on a fast schedule, is now able to pick as his running mate a senator who voted for the invasion in 2002 and whose favored "solution" would have required more rather than less American involvement in Iraqi domestic politics.

Duh.

"We rejected his proposal when he announced it..." Funny, I don't recall hearing that on Anderson Cooper 180 or reading it from the Paper of Record. Funny.

Maybe next time Joe will remember to ask them first.

OBAMA WANTS TO TRAVEL
ON A FINE CHINESE TRAIN

JUSTIN SAYS "YOU CAN HAVE IT"

[I fixed about a dozen typos -- Justin had had a hard day]

The train was unbelievable, I don't know where to start.

We climbed onto the carriage with our rucksacks to a sight of hoards of Chinese sitting, standing, hanging and perching everywhere imaginable. Everybody stopped talking as the 2 aliens (thankfull pretty wasted by this point) made their way down the carriage to their seat, pushing, climbing, even standing on the locals to sqeeze through.

Once seated a crowd gathered around us just staring with the occasional comment in Chinese. After about an hour of this we got talking to a local boy and spent the next few hours drinking more and helping him speak English, by the end he was fully fluent in almost 6 swear words and our job was done.

Did I mention that every other minute someone is coughing up phlegm which either goes straight onto the floor with the discarded newspapers/ciggarette ash/cashew nuts/locals who couldn't afford a seat, or gets launched out the window with an amazing noise that I've grown to love.

Night time comes so it's time to sleep...yeah right. Even with a travel pillow and a an eye mask it's impossible. Either the food trolley is rammed down the aisle into your leg every 30 minutes, or a local is leaning on top of you snoring (thankfuly they don't dribble), or someone with a megaphone (yes really, at 3am this morning) is standing in the carriage selling socks or newspapers or horns are blowing and at 2am the fella behind me went through his entire polyphonic ringtone collection...twice.

Glad to be off the train but it was certainly an experience. We are shattered.

[Yeah, I know, it was 2005. But my reliable source told the same story just a year ago.]


THINK THE OBAMESSIAH WOULD ENJOY THESE ARRANGEMENTS? :

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD....

Hear that munching sound? The world's termites and maggots are busily nibbling away at the edges of mankind's well-being -- pretty much as we left things when we headed off for more pleasant horizons:





Yeah, I know everybody on the web is using it, but it's kind of irresistable:


Bring the good old bugle, boys,
we'll sing another song
Sing it with a spirit that
will start the world along
Sing it as we used to sing it, 50,000 strong
While we were marching through Georgia.

Chorus
Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from [Ossetia] to the sea
While we were marching through Georgia.

I do recall feeling my gag reflex way back when George Bush looked into Vlad the Impaler Putin's eyes and saw a good soul, or whatever the heck it was. What misgivings I had about John McCain have receded proportionally upon hearing about his other [besides the Surge] moment of prescience:

While it's all looking very bleak, at least we can see a glimmer of hope in the powerful words of Georgian President Saakashvili. Perennial genial lightweight Glenn Beck seems to have developed a rapport with the Saak-man, and let him rip for an hour on a recent show. (a Youtube 3-parter)





MEGA-CHURCHER WARREN HOSTS A
PORPOISE-DRIVEN DEBATE

Normally I have nothing but suspicion toward mega-church enterprises, but California's Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren seems benign enough, and I'm told that his mega-selling book A Purpose-Driven Life is not without substance.

So Warren invited the two presumptive presidential nominees to separate but equal public interviews on matters of faith and principle. Each was to have the opportunity to answer the same questions without knowledge of how the other responded.

I didn't watch it. Frankly, I'm not all that interested in the faith-related musings of either candidate -- McCain seems a nice enough guy with a nominal attachment to some Protestant community, but I would characterize his mode of expression as pretty much the stuff of the American secular religion: God not particularly distinguished from Country. Obama's religious associations, no matter how much he tries to distance himself from them, are throughly repugnant, and I could never consider anything he has to say on matters theological or spiritual to be anything but tainted and twisted at the root.

I needn't have worried, since at his most reflective he declared one of the defining public policy issues of the modern age to be both theologically and scientifically "above his pay grade." Unfortunately the cool dude from Illinois didn't seem to grasp that big public policy issues have a way of insisting that we craft some kind of legal "specificity" to best keep peace and order in society, and THAT, Mr. Obama, is within the presidential and legislative pay grades -- the buck stops in the District of Columbia.

Obama's attempt at sudden (and thoroughly implausible) humility in the face of a great moral question has only succeeded in keeping alive a hot-button political issue which the feminist left thought it had successfully aborted (as 'twere), thereby resuscitating the appalling Obama record on the fate of infants accidentally born alive after an attempted abortion. For the sake of their mothers' theoretical womb-autonomy, Mr. Obama has supported the legalized manslaughter of the stubbornly alive newborn. And he has stood virtually alone, even among liberal Democrats, on this issue -- a rather distasteful variation on his status as "The One."

So if Nat Hentoff's characterization of Obama as "the Infanticide Candidate" a few months back hasn't quite stuck in the public mind, the pot has now been duly stirred by the Obamessiah's own pitifully clumsy evasiveness at the Saddleback forum. Obama's voting record on Born Alive Infant Protection and Partial Birth Abortion is the scummy bathwater he was hoping would get thrown out with the baby, but he seems to have accomplished yet another pratfall while treading in his own oil-slick.

God love him -- the gift that keeps on giving! Thanks to Mr. Obama's verbal contortionism, Rich Lowry at National Review is writing this, Paul Kengor at Political Mavens is writing this, and Kyle-Ann Shiver at American Thinker is writing this. Hey, Barry, thanks for the memory.

Obama's Saddleback performance was so poor that his campaign is now circulating far-fetched stories of McCain having access to both the questions and his rival's answers ahead of time -- because, as NBC's Andrea Mitchell observed, "he seemed so well prepared."

He was, Andrea.

FOUR YEARS AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY,
TWENTY-TWO YEARS IN THE MILITARY,
FIVE+ YEARS IN THE HANOI HILTON,
AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE U.S. SENATE
WILL DO THAT FOR YOU.

Not to mention having a moderately well-developed set of principles -- translation: you've figured out what the important stuff is, and have pretty much decided what you think about it.

Helps a lot in answering questions, Andrea. Helps you sound prepared.

NBC: still Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puff. (There, I said it.)


WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!

That explains the close competition between American and Chinese female gymnasts, at what has turned out to be a pretty good Olympics hosted by Merry Maoists. Heck, the smog has cleared so much you can see across the street!

Still a bit foggy in record-keeping for the "Birthday Girls" however. The gymnastic coaches tell us that there are definite advantages to pulling off the required stunts when you've got a team of "pixies" as one called them. Last November's Xinhua Newspaper listed [now gold-medal winner] He Kexin as a promising "little girl" of 13 years old. By this summer her birthdate had jumped into the Way-
Back Machine and landed at January 1st (phew!) 1992.

Since the women[?]'s individual uneven bars gold medal was a numerical tie that had to be broken [by restoring dropped lowest scores and averaging to the thousandth of a point], it was of course pretty galling for grown woman almost-19-year-old American Nastia Liuken,to lose to overnight 16-year-old He Kexin. Hey, folks, that's why we call 'em Chi-Coms!

I'm with Jon Stewart on this one (colourful language alert!).




[Maybe if we keep kneeling down nobody will notice how teeny we are.]



Trying to look older than we really are: isn't that doing a reverse triple Pelosi in the tuck position?

AT LONG LAST

Olympic-sized kudos to Canada's Ian Millar, 61-year-old king of the mounted.


He's won so many compe- titions and been in so many Olympics (eight) I had not realized that he had no Olympic medal to show for it. The Canadian team won their silver, the first national medal in 40 years.

Sad that Millar could not share this long-awaited prize with his wife and pardner, Lynn, who died last year, after working by his side at the equestrian arts for more than three decades. The long and lanky horseman, with his seemingly perpetually sunny face, dedicated his medal to the angel he knew was riding with him.

Millar's long-time mount, the aptly-named Big Ben, didn't live to share the moment either. Strange that the magnificently huge horse never brought Millar Olympic glory -- though now that he's dead and isn't here to defend himself, we are given to understand that he could be a bit distracted by all the adulation and tended toward overconfidence!... Well, we can forgive him a little vanity.

Ben's friend In Style has carried Millar to glory at last -- extra measure of oats, please.

Our intrepid (understatement of the century) reporter, MICHAEL YON, offers this photo of today's explosive events in Baghdad.


Muslims and Christians join together to replace a cross on the dome of the Church of St. John in Baghdad. Damn that George Bush! Peace is breaking out all over Iraq! How did this happen? Yon has profferred his own cautious explanations, but mostly he just places himself in medias res and lets us see what he sees. His minimalist report of this particular revolution is here with more coverage and comment here. Money quote (from our victims, the Iraqis):

Thank you for peace.... all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.

Some folks couldn't help but think of another, long ago iconic war photo-- the one that vast swaths of the political left in America have been actively (if sometimes subconsciously) wishing would be recreated in Iraq (you know who you are, and don't waste your breath denying it):

It ain't over till it's over, but don't look for this scene transferred to Baghdad any too soon.

Michael Yon is a self-embedded reporter, one of a handful who (history will show) have been the only living journalists telling the true and unadorned story of the Iraq war. His work is supported only by donations or purchases of his photos. I've got two-- I now see myself buying a third. Go to the website and help make it all possible. His Pulitzer may yet be in the mail.


Cincinnatus checks in from Al Asad




He's too busy to check in very often, but we look forward to all he observes from the bottom of the Sandbox.









While he's making himself useful for the future of the planet, back here at home....


Rip Van Kerry wakes up four years later and says, "Hey! Wanna piece o' me? Bring it on!"

Fully occupied with the business of being outraged by the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth in 2004, John Kerry failed to present a single piece of evidence to counter their accusations that his military decorations were nearly as bogus as his Winter Soldier testimony and colleagues.


But this time, by gum, he'll answer every single charge that's raised-- if he could just get someone to raise them. Again. Cuz he's ready. Just say "go" and he's out of the blocks. Pow. He's got the answers. So there 's no need to sign that Standard Form 180 for the full release of his military records, cuz he's got all the stuff right there in his briefcase-- just ask him, and he'll produce it -- pronto. Just ask him. Please?

Anybody got any questions? Any at all? You in the back row.....


Senator Ted Kennedy -- Memo to File and Note to Self:
"Mary Jo Kopechne would have survived waterboarding."

As a long-time expert on the drowning of people trapped in confined spaces, Kennedy should know this, as he bloviates on the subject of barbaric acts.


Appropos of absolutely nothing: Gary Sinise is under attack

I'm a big Gary Sinise fan, as both actor and human being (devoted supporter of the troops and the USO, and of the kids of Iraq), but I'm very concerned about what I have just observed in the latest episode of his series CSI:New York. It is my considered opinion that his head is occupied territory, the victim of an invasion by one of the worst hairpieces on television. I've long suspected that he wears a rug, but at least it didn't used to sit on his head like a furry yarmulke of a slightly different shade of henna than the rest of his hair. Am I right?

















Come on, folks-- this is a fine actor and a good guy. He shouldn't have to go around looking like he's got an auburn tribble on his head.

(Wouldn't it be great if people like this could just come out of the wig closet and show off their shiny tonsures with pride?)


Previously undiscovered species found in District of Columbia

You've heard the saying "Once a Marine, always a Marine." (Well, you shoulda heard it.) Perhaps we all spoke too soon, because there's been a possible historic sighting, perhaps the first ever recorded, of that most rare, basically legendary, species, "the Ex-Marine." It has beady little eyes in a rodentesque face, and sits back on its big fat hanches, making bellowing noises and counting its earmark money. It is said to resemble this:
Recently spotted roaming the halls of Congress. Considered to be dangerous, armed with a poisonous tongue, though not particularly intelligent. Has eyesight too poor to see what's right smack in front of it. Feeds on a steady diet of pork.